[In the following essay, Herrick compares the plays and practices of the improvisational and scripted theatres, finding evidence that the commedia dell'arte borrowed many of its plots from the commedia erudite.]

The learned comedy never reached a wide audience in Italy, for it was confined to the larger towns and even within these larger towns to a limited audience of educated people who could relish a literary performance as well as slapstick. Outside of Italy the learned comedy was known only to the highly educated few or to the professional playwrights who could make use of it in their own work. Popular comedies before 1550 were religious plays or farces. The actors in these religious plays and farces, and in the learned comedies, too, were generally amateurs. In the second half of the century the professional actors appeared, that is, actors who made a living by their art, and it was these professional actors who constituted the commedia dell' arte, which is a better term than “masked comedy” or “improvised comedy” although the performers did wear masks and did rely in large part upon improvisations.

These professional actors and actresses, the Italian comedians, became organized in more or less stable companies that soon grew famous not only in Italy but in nearly every country of western Europe. The commedia dell' arte, with its Pantaloon, Harlequin, Doctor, and Captain, is better known to most students of the drama outside of Italy than are the masterpieces of Ariosto, Machiavelli, Aretino, and Della Porta. Since there are many competent studies of the Italian comedians in Italian, French, and German, and even in English, there is no need for a detailed account of them here. Some comparison of their popular comedy with its learned sister—or shall we say mother?—is necessary.

Scholars have tried to retrace the commedia dell' arte to the ancient Roman theater, specifically to the fabula Atellana, a kind of Punch-and-Judy show utilizing masked stock characters, which in turn may have been derived from earlier Greek farces. Perhaps Harlequin and Pantaloon were direct descendants of the ancient Roman clowns, but their genealogy cannot be established by factual records, for there are no texts, no direct evidence of any such connection. The history of the commedia dell' arte before 1600 depends mainly on fragmentary notices in letters and diaries, and consequently there are few records of its early growth.

It has been argued that the commedia dell' arte was an outgrowth of the Italian farce that flourished at the close of the fifteenth century and during the first half of the sixteenth. Ruzzante (Angelo Beolco), for example, has been called a forerunner of the world-famous Italian clowns. It is true that Ruzzante was apparently a gifted pantominist, that certain routine situations such as quarrels and beatings were repeated over and over again in his farces, and that Ruzzante may have been a good improviser. There is a valid argument against accepting this theory, however, since the character of Ruzzante was not fixed but varied from play to play; sometimes he was a soldier and sometimes a simple peasant. In other words, Ruzzante was not a stock character like the Captain or the Doctor or Pantaloon. It is more reasonable to say that the literary comedy in general, the ancient comedies of Plautus and Terence, those of the learned dramatists, and the farces of Ruzzante and others, suggested the routine situations and the stock characters of the commedia dell' arte. The farces must have exerted a considerable influence upon popular comedy, but the farce exerted some influence upon the learned comedy as well, and the learned comedy in turn influenced the sixteenth-century farce.

The documents supplying what little is known of the development of popular comedy, aside from letters and diaries, are the records of traveling companies, some surviving outlines of plots (scenarios¹), some prologues, monologues, set speeches, and bits of dialogue.² There is some reliable information about the personnel of the companies that toured northern Italy, Germany, France, Spain, and England before 1600 and that continued to flourish throughout the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth. Several companies became famous, for example, the Gelosi, the Confidenti, the Uniti, and the Accessi.

The personnel of these companies might change from time to time, for actors would leave one company and join another or two companies would combine. The number of actors in a regular touring company was small, usually not over a dozen, three women and seven or eight men.

The women played the innamorate, the mothers, maidservants, nurses, bawds, and courtesans. The first lady, la prima donna, usually called Isabella or Flaminia, Lidia, Celia, Flavia, Silvia, all names prominent in the learned comedy, played the principal innamorata. The second and third women played the secondary innamorate and the other female parts. The maidservants bore such names as Franceschina, Colombina, Rosetta, Fioretta, and Pimpinella. The men played the young lovers, the old fathers, servants, soldier, doctor, and necromancer. The young lovers had such names as Orazio, Flavio, Ottavio, Flaminio, Fabio, Lelio, all names prominent in the learned comedy. The old men, the vecchi, were usually called Pantalone, Tofano, or Graziano. Pantalone was a Venetian merchant, usually a wealthy magnifico. Graziano was a doctor, either a lawyer or a physician, who had gone to the University of Bologna. The second servant, Arlecchino or Brighella, was originally from Bergamo, and the learned comedy swarmed with clownish Bergamasks. Pulcinella (the English Punch) was a Neapolitan. There were many humorous names for the servants, the zanni, such as Pedrolino (saucy), Burattino (puppet), Trappola (pitfall), and Grillo (cricket). The Captain, often called Spavento (fear), was either an Italian or a Spanish braggart.

Typical dramatis personae may be seen in the fifty giornate, or scenari as they would be called today, published by the famous comic actor Flaminio Scala in 1611.³ The first giornata, for example, entitled Li duo vecchi gemelli (“The Two Old Twins”), has thirteen masks or roles, possibly divided among eleven players: two young men (Flavio and Oratio), a manservant (Pedrolino), a maid-servant (Franceschina), a bawd (Pasquella), a young widow (Isabella), a doctor (Gratiano), the doctor's daughter (Flaminia), a captain (Spavento), a second servant (Arlecchino), two elderly Venetian merchants, i.e. the twins (Pantalone and Tofano), and an Armenian merchant (Hibrahim).

A few other titles in Scala's collection will further illustrate the kind of comedy and suggest parallels with the literary plays of the learned dramatists: Il vecchio geloso (“The Jealous Old Man”), Il marito (“The Husband”), La sposa (“The Bride”), Il dottor disperato (“The Doctor Past Cure”), Il finto negromante (“The Counterfeit Sorcerer”), Li finti servi (“The Counterfeit Servants”), Il pedante (“The Pedant”).

The dramatis personae of all these comic scenarios are similar, being slight variations of the same stock characters, such as Flavio, Isabella, Pedrolino, Arlecchino, Franceschina, Pantalone, Gratiano, Spavento. The plots were mostly drawn from Plautus and Terence and the Italian authors of the learned comedy. Each giornata is divided into three acts instead of the five almost invariably used by the learned dramatists. There is no dialogue, but there are detailed directions for movements and stage business, including numerous indications of specific lazzi (pantomimes appropriate for particular situations or characterizations), for example, “he makes lazzi of love” or “he makes lazzi of fear” or “he makes lazzi of jealousy.”

While the chief fame of the traveling Italian players rested on their performances of comedy, they sometimes presented serious dramas. Scala's fifty giornate include a tragedy, a pastoral, several “operas,” and a comical-pastoral-tragical play. A century later, the historian of the theater Luigi Riccoboni called attention to the proficiency and versatility of these small companies: “Yet when they are to act a tragedy which requires a large number of players, every one of them is employed; even Harlequin lays aside his mask, and they all declaim in verse as properly as if they were natives of Rome. This practice renders them capable of doing justice to the most sublime sentiments of dramatic writing and at the same time of agreeably imitating the most ridiculous oddities in nature.”⁴

Although the Italian comedians relied mainly upon improvised dialogue, and they must have been remarkably adept at making extempore speeches to fit the outlines of plot and the indicated lazzi, they did not depend entirely upon improvisations. Many actors, certainly the better ones, spent much time in reading and study, and they memorized a large stock of phrases, sentences, conceits, monologues, and even dialogues, which could be drawn upon at will. Probably most of this written material has been lost, but much remains, songs, speeches, and dialogues of servants (zanni), the old man (il vecchio), the captain, the doctor, and the lovers.⁵

One of the most interesting surviving documents is Francesco Andreini's Le bravure del Capitan Spavento della valle inferna (“The Braveries of Captain Fear of Hell Valley”), first published at Venice in 1607.⁶ The author, who was a renowned player of the braggart soldier, gathered together a host of brags. His Spavento is a descendant of the captain in Plautus and Terence and the learned dramatists: he boasts that he is nobly born, companion of the great, world traveler, master of all weapons and of all athletic games, a seasoned warrior who has fought in all the great battles and sieges of his time, veteran dueler, irresistible lover, devotee of literature and learning, poet, and rhetorician. Actually he is a poverty-stricken nobody, a coward, an ignoramus, and the laughingstock of women. His one genuine accomplishment is a flow of language usually devoted to colossal lies. There is no doubt that Spavento owed much to the soldiers of the learned comedy; his very name was evidently borrowed from the captain in Parabosco's Pellegrino (1552).

A fair sample of Spavento's style is the opening of section III of the Bravure. He is talking with his servant Trappola.

CAPTAIN:
The greatest discord and the highest controversy have sprung up in the city where we now are only because every one of the noblest cavaliers would like to be allied with me and to give me a wife. Therefore I am resolved to take a wife, not to say a consort, which signifies a mate of the same quality and no woman could match my quality and partake of my dignities and honors.
TRAPPOLA:
Yours is a fine resolution, Master, since matrimony is a most important bond and arose with our first parents, and which is dissolved only by death. But how will you manage it having as many bastard children as you do?
CAPTAIN:
It is true, indeed it is very true that I am plentifully supplied with bastard children, who can never succeed to the inheritance of my treasures and of my dignities, as will the scion born of legitimate and secure matrimony.
TRAPPOLA:
Dear Master, tell me a little about the number of your bastards and with what women you begot them.
CAPTAIN:
The number is great, yes very great, and if all of my bastards had to be taken to a foundling hospital, the whole world would not be big enough to make a hospital for them.

Egged on by Trappola, Spavento warms up to the account of his prodigious feats.

CAPTAIN:
The first children that I ever generated were in the quarrel, the rivalry, the contest that I had with Hercules, son of Jove and Alcmena, and a bastard himself, who made me a bet, saying that he would get more damsels with child in a single night that I would.
TRAPPOLA:
Reason for rousing the appetite of every woman who might have lost her taste for green beans!
CAPTAIN:
I came to the deed and to the proof. In a single night Hercules got fifty damsels with child and in half a night I got two hundred.
TRAPPOLA:
Oh, look you, how many nurses it was necessary to find, how many swaddling clothes, how many clouts, how much milk and pap to feed them!

Sometimes the comedians would present a literary drama, and some of the more learned ones turned their hands to writing whole plays as well as monologues and set speeches. Lea lists about thirty extant plays published by these professional actors and actresses. The earliest on her list is a neoclassical tragedy, Afrodite (1579), by Adriano Valerini, who was a learned poet-actor in the company of the Gelosi. The earliest comedy on her list is Bernardino Lombardi's L'alchimista (1583). Lombardi played the doctor in the Confidenti and in the combined company of Uniti Confidenti.

It was common practice for the comedians to base a scenario on a literary play. The comedies of Della Porta, for example, were favorite sources, and Della Porta himself may have written scenari.⁷ Other dramatists whose comedies provided scenari were Bibbiena, Dolce, Piccolomini, Secchi, Razzi, D'Ambra, and Groto.

Occasionally the professional actors would reverse the process; that is, they would turn a scenario back into a literary drama. Some such process was probably involved in Lombardi's “Alchemist,” and it certainly operated in the composition of another literary product of the commedia dell' arte, namely, Angelica (1585) by Fabrizio de Fornaris, a Neapolitan actor in the Confidenti who was celebrated for his role of Captain Crocodile.

A scenario entitled L'astrologo del Porta has been preserved,⁸ and this was evidently based on Della Porta's Astrologo, for the plots and characters are substantially the same. While Della Porta's play was not published until 1606, it was probably written much earlier. The author, who was born in 1535, remarked in the prologue to his “Two Rival Brothers” that his comedies were “diversions of his childhood” (scherzi della sua fanciullezza). At all events, if Lombardi used Della Porta's play or a scenario based on it, he made many changes.

Both the “Astrologer” and the “Alchemist” used the basic situation of a father and son being rivals for the hand of the same woman. Both used thieves as minor characters and a courtesan in much the same way.

The differences between the two comedies, however, are greater than the similarities. Lombardi added a braggart captain and a parasite and omitted one of Della Porta's best characters, a peasant. Lombardi's clever servant, named Vulpino (fox), is more important in the intrigues than is Della Porta's Cricca. Vulpino engineers most of the action and is an adept at disguise. Cricca, while actively engaged in helping his young master to win the girl and in warning his old master against the wiles of the astrologer, is himself deceived for a time.

The most important difference between the two plays is in the characters of the astrologer and alchemist. Lombardi's Momo is a respectable but foolish citizen who has become infatuated with alchemy and so sets himself up as an easy dupe for any rogue, including his own servant, who wants to fleece him. Vulpino characterizes him accurately in the first scene when he says, “The canker take all besmoked alchemists like the master; the simpleton wishes to become a philosopher and he doesn't know gold from lead or the difference between the beaker and the urinal.” Della Porta's Albumazar is a rogue himself, like Ben Jonson's Subtle, and sets out with his confederates to swindle old Pandolfo. If Lombardi used Della Porta's play or the scenario, he transformed Pandolfo into an amateur alchemist and thus altered the course of action.

The Angelica of Fornaris is a better play than Lombardi's “Alchemist.” In the dedication of the 1585 edition,⁹ the author explained that he had expanded a Neapolitan scenario into a full-length comedy. I have never seen this scenario, but the original learned comedy upon which it must have been based is extant, namely, Olimpia by the Neapolitan Della Porta. Olimpia was first printed in 1589, but it was probably written some years before that. The sequence might well have been the comedy, then a scenario, and then Fornaris' Angelica.

Since Angelica is an authentic product of the commedia dell' arte, since its literary model is extant, and since it is a pretty good play in its own right, it will serve to illustrate the close relationship between the learned and popular comedy of the sixteenth century.

Fornaris followed Della Porta so closely that he must have memorized the play or had a copy of it on his desk. Plots, characters, and dialogues are similar, often identical. Usually only minor changes were made, such as changing the names of some characters, slight rearrangements of scenes and speeches, and the moving of the locale from Naples to Venice.

Della Porta's braggart soldier, and a good one, is an Italian named Trasilogo. Fornaris changed his name to Coccodrillo and made him a Spaniard; more often than not he merely translated Trasilogo's speeches into Spanish. Another change, which was more radical, was transforming Della Porta's pedantic schoolmaster into a simple servant. It seems reasonable to suppose that Fornaris found the tutor's Latin quotations and learned allusions too academic for the popular audience. On the other hand, Della Porta's parasite Mastica (chewer) was kept name and all, and most of his speeches preserved.

The common argument of Olimpia and Angelica, using the names of Fornaris' characters, runs as follows.

The nurse Balia opens the play by explaining to her gossip that Angelica has fallen in love with a Neapolitan student at Padua named Fulvio, but that her mother has arranged a match for her with the Spanish soldier Captain Crocodile. In desperation, Angelica has devised a scheme to avoid this hateful marriage and at the same time enjoy her student lover. Her father and brother had been captured by Turkish pirates twenty years before and have never been heard from since. Therefore Anglica has forged a letter written by her long-lost brother informing his mother than his father is dead but that he has escaped from the Turks and is now on his way home to Venice. Then she has sent word to Padua by the parasite that Fulvio is to pose as this brother.

Fulvio is already in Venice, having come to see his sweetheart. Mastica finds him, however, and delivers the instructions. Since Fulvio has now heard that Captain Crocodile is marrying Angelica that very evening, he goes into action without delay. He dresses as a Turkish slave and is welcomed by his “mother” Mabilia and by his “sister” Angelica.

Meanwhile the real father and brother have actually escaped from the Turks and are now in Venice. These two, Gismondo and Mutio, turn up at Mabilia's house, only to be confronted by the counterfeit Mutio (i.e. Fulvio) and denounced as impostors. Thereupon Gismondo and Mutio appeal to the police and the situation grows serious.

Fulvio and the parasite manage to fob off the police for a while, but a showdown is precipitated by the arrival of Fulvio's father from Naples. At first Fulvio denies his father but is finally forced to recognize him in order to save himself from prison. Since Fulvio is the only son and heir of a wealthy gentleman, he is a desirable match for Angelica, and the two young people are happily married, the braggart soldier left out in the cold.

As mentioned earlier, time and time again Fornaris took over whole scenes from Olimpia, sometimes verbatim, or nearly so, and sometimes with slight changes calculated to add a few more colorful details. It must be admitted that most of the good speeches in Angelica are Della Porta's. A few examples will illustrate the imitation.

The parasite Mastica was the traditional character borrowed from Plautus and Terence, but the Italians gave him a fresh turn or two. He introduces himself with the following speech in Olimpia (1.2): “The doctors of my country say that there is an infirmity called lupa (she-wolf) which produces a hunger so famished that the more one eats the hungrier he is. I judge that I was born with this disease not only in my guts but in the marrow of my bones, nor can all the syrups, medicines, and purges in the world drive it out.” In Angelica (1.2) Mastica says: “The doctors of my country say that there is an infirmity called lupa which is famished by so great a hunger that it is necessary to be always eating; if not, one would gnaw his own arms. I think I was born with this disease in my guts; nor could all the syrups, medicines, and purges in the world make me evacuate it.”

When Mastica is flattering the captain he fabricates pretty speeches of the soldier's betrothed. In Olimpia (1.5):

TRASILOGO:
What does Olimpia say about me?
MASTICA:
That last night she dreamed of you, that you seem to her to be the finest gentleman in the world.

In Angelica (1.4) the parasite elaborates a bit upon this theme: “This morning when she left her room all merry and joyful she said to me, ‘O my Mastica, I can call myself the happiest woman in the world since Fortune has chosen me to be the wife of the finest, handsomest, most valiant captain alive.’”

Both authors made the student hero a very emotional, high-spirited youth, one who is easily uplifted and as easily cast down. When he learns that his sweetheart is going to marry the soldier he goes to pieces, begins to rave against all women, and refuses to be consoled by his comrade. Della Porta's Lampridio says to Giulio: “Do me a favor, brother; lead me to the great mole, because now I wish to throw myself in the sea” (2.4). Fornaris shifted the scene to Venice and expanded the speech somewhat; Fulvio says, “If you really wish to do me a favor, lead me to the Grand Canal and throw me in with a stone around my neck, because the grief I feel for the broken troth of Angelica is so great that I cannot possibly support it long, nor can I live in this way” (2.4).

Often Fornaris could not improve upon his model and took over speeches nearly verbatim. When Lampridio meets his fellow student Giulio he is anxious for any news about his sweetheart. In Olimpia (2.2).

GIULIO:
Now tell me how you are.
LAMPRIDIO:
You tell me, brother, how I am, because you know better than I.
GIULIO:
How?
LAMPRIDIO:
If Olimpia loves me, I am very well; if she doesn't love me, I am worse than dead.

In Angelica (2.2):

GIULIO:
Well, then, how are you?
FULVIO:
You tell me, brother, because you know better than I.
GIULIO:
And how can I know better than you?
FULVIO:
If my Angelica loves me I am very well, if not, I am worse than dead.

It might be argued that Fornaris' dialogue here would be a little easier to learn because the speeches are more closely connected by the device of repetition, but the difference is trifling.

Even the Spanish soldier Captain Crocodile, the role that made Fornaris famous, is usually just a Spanish version of Della Porta's character. One of the key passages, for example, wherein the two rivals for the heroine come face to face, was taken over nearly verbatim, with the soldier's speeches translated into Spanish. The soldier's servant Squadra is also present.

LAMPRIDIO:
You're afraid of me?
TRASILOGO:
I'm afraid of me, not of you.
LAMPRIDIO:
Sheep, jackass!
SQUADRA:
Answer him, Master.
TRASILOGO:
God give you evil, I don't call myself so!
LAMPRIDIO:
You're running away, eh?
TRASILOGO:
I walk fast [2.7].

In Angelica (2.7):

FULVIO:
You're afraid of me?
CAPTAIN:
I'm afraid of me, not of you.
FULVIO:
Sheep, jackass!
SQUADRA:
Answer him, Master.
CAPTAIN:
Why do you want me to answer him if he doesn't call me?
FULVIO:
You're running away, Captain? A poltroon, eh?
CAPTAIN:
I am walking as I usually do.

Angelica is not a very bawdy play, but occasionally Fornaris carried the suggestion of bawdry further than did Della Porta. When the mother welcomes her long-lost son (i.e. the impostor who pretends to be her son) she introduces him to his sister. In Olimpia (3.3):

SENNIA:
Olimpia, embrace your brother. Why are you so bashful?
LAMPRIDIO:
O sister, my sweetest soul!
OLIMPIA:
O better loved than brother, I don't know you yet.

In Angelica, Fornaris played up the suggestiveness of the scene, adding the parasite to further it.

MABILIA:
Angelica, my daughter, embrace your brother. Why are you so bashful?
FULVIO:
O my soul, sweetest sister, how much satisfaction I feel in holding you in my arms.
ANGELICA:
O better loved than brother, I don't know you yet as I wish to.
MASTICA:
There will be time for you to know him more intimately.

Fornaris expanded the first scene of the last act in the direction of more bawdry. In this scene the mother learns that her daughter and “son” have been behaving in a way that is scarcely sisterly or brotherly. In Olimpia, a page reports that the two young people have shut themselves in a bedroom. When pressed, he admits that he looked through the keyhole, but mentions no details of what he saw. Sennia realizes what has happened and wants no details. In Angelica, however, a maidservant is more obliging; she fills in the picture she saw through the keyhole.

Fornaris made a real change in substituting a faithful family servant for Della Porta's pedant, and this change necessitated his rewriting most of the pedant's speeches. In Olimpia (2.1), Protodidascalo mentions some gossip that he has just heard.

PROTO.:
Didn't Giulio write you that Olimpia didn't want you to come to Naples? And were we not told in the tavern that Olimpia was marrying a certain famous captain?
LAMPRIDIO:
It's a lie. Don't believe it.
PROTO.:
No one believes what displeases him. But I am forgetting all the Ciceronian rules of speaking and I may not be able to finish the sixth of Virgil that I began, if you won't follow what I am telling you; obtestor deum—for deorum—atque hominum fidem.

The corresponding passage in Angelica runs as follows:

GHERARDO:
Wasn't it said in the boat that an Angelica, daughter of Madonna Mabilia, was marrying a certain Spanish captain today?
FULVIO:
It's a lie. Don't believe it.
GHERARDO:
You don't believe it? Because it displeases you to believe it.

Thanks to Della Porta, one of the best of the learned dramatists, Fornaris succeeded in writing a good comedy, one worthy of comparison with the better learned comedies. He must be given credit for not spoiling his model; he preserved the best features of Olimpia and added a few happy touches of his own. It may be assumed that the play was successful on the stage, and it had some literary success as well for it was reprinted at Venice in 1607.

The commedia dell' arte was not only intimately connected with the commedia erudita but often was inseparable. The Italian comedians based their plots, their characters, and even their speeches on the learned comedy. They usually made these plots, characters, and speeches broader, more obvious, more ridiculous, and put more emphasis on pantomime. They apparently used music and dancing throughout the performance in contrast with the usual practice in the learned comedy, which put most of the music and dancing in intermezzi.

One is tempted to conjecture that the professionals curtailed many of the long-winded speeches that most learned comedies abounded in. The fact that the scenarios were divided into three acts instead of five supports such a conjecture. On the other hand, when one of the professionals ventured to expand a scenario into a five-act comedy, as Fornaris did and as Lombardi probably did, the result was about as long-winded as the average learned comedy. Lombardi's “Alchemist” is a pretty tedious play.

No historian can accurately evaluate the inevitable compromise in actual production between the written word and action. He must assume, however, that the professionals of the commedia dell' arte excelled in acting and therefore put literature second, as indeed it should be put when a play is performed on a popular stage. Judging from the records, the written records, the whole problem of the relationship between popular comedy and literary comedy is best summed up by Sanesi, who maintains that the commedia dell' arte is a “popular adaptation or travesty of the learned comedy.”¹⁰

This close relationship between popular and learned Italian comedy makes it extremely difficult to determine whether or not it was the commedia dell' arte or the commedia erudita or both that influenced this or that French or English play of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Unless one is dealing with clear-cut translations or adaptations like Pierre Larivey's Comédies facétieuses, which were based on learned comedies by Dolce, Grazzini, Razzi, Gabiani, Secchi, et al., or with George Gascoigne's Supposes, which is virtually a translation of Ariosto's I suppositi, with Chapman's May-Day, an adaptation of Piccolomini's Alessandro, or with Marston's What You Will, a reworking of the secondary action of Oddi's I morti vivi, it is often impossible to distinguish between popular and literary sources or parallels. A good case, for example, can be made for Ben Jonson's borrowing from Aretino's Marescalco in the Silent Woman, but no real case can be made for any direct connection between Jonson's Alchemist and Lombardi's Alchimista or Della Porta's Astrologo, although the English poet may have known both Italian plays and the Alchemist contains Italianate features common to both the learned comedy and the commedia dell' arte. It seems probable, but hardly certain, that Jonson in Volpone drew upon the commedia dell' arte in the mountebank scene (2.2), perhaps upon such scenari as Scala's La fortuna di Flavio and Il pedante, both of which contain similar scenes.¹¹

The problem of identifying Italian analogues or parallels may be illustrated by Shakespeare's plays, which have been subjected to long and careful examination by several generations of scholars and critics. It should always be emphasized that parallels are not sources, though some of them may be possible sources.¹² A host of Italian analogues and possible sources has been assembled, many of them nondramatic tales, some of them literary dramas, some of them scenari of the commedia dell' arte. A brief summary will show how widespread the Italianate flavor was throughout the works of the greatest English dramatist. I shall pay no heed to the nondramatic material, but point out parallels to the commedia dell' arte and occasionally to the learned comedy.

In the early comedy Love's Labor's Lost there are two characters descended directly or indirectly from stock Italian characters: Don Armado, who is akin to Capitano Spavento, and the pedant Holofernes, who is akin to the Bolognese doctor Graziano. As every student of Shakespeare knows, the Comedy of Errors is an English adaptation of Plautus' Menaechmi. Plautus was not the only contributor, however, for some characters, the servants especially, are more Italian than Roman. As Lea says, “By status the Dromios of Shakespeare's play are the slaves of Latin comedy, but in behavior and misfortunes they are the servants of the commedia dell' arte.”¹³ My colleague Professor T. W. Baldwin agrees substantially with Lea; he once remarked to me: “I would consider the Comedy of Errors one of the most thoroughly Italianate plays of the time, yet I can't put my finger on a thing specifically Italian in it. Even Dromio for Dromo comes from Lyly's Bombie, as evidently did the desire to outcomplicate Lyly.” The trials of the lovers in the Two Gentlemen of Verona are similar to the trials of the lovers in Scala's Flavio tradito, and Julia's disguising herself as a boy in order to win back her lover is paralleled by Isabella's disguise in Scala's Gelosa Isabella.

The use of situations, devices, and characters prominent in the commedia dell' arte was not confined to Elizabethan comedy; some of the tragedies may have drawn upon the Italian comedians. Scala's Li tragici successi offers a close parallel to the plot of Romeo and Juliet, with the ending changed, of course, to a happy one. As we have seen in earlier chapters, the Romeo-and-Juliet story was common property for the writers of tragedy, comedy, and tragicomedy. Hamlet's advice to the players might well have been addressed to one of the traveling Italian companies. Polonius has many characteristics of Pantalone the magnifico; specifically his sententious advice to Laertes is paralleled by a scene in Scala's Li tappeti Alessandrini.

A parallel to Bottom's metamorphosis in the Midsummer Night's Dream may be found in the pastoral scenario of Il Pantaloncino, wherein Pantalone is changed into an ass.¹⁴ The mix-up of lovers in the same play is a routine situation in Italian comedy. Kate in the Taming of the Shrew has been compared with the reluctant bride in Scala's Il pellegrino fido amante. Falstaff of Henry IV shares many qualities with the Italian braggart soldier, but there is a closer parallel between Captain Pistol and Capitano Spavento. Shylock has features in common with the Venetian merchant of Italian comedy; specifically his troubles are similar to those of Pantalone in Scala's La pazzia d'Isabella and in his Il fido amico. A situation similar to the trumped-up accusation of the heroine in Much Ado About Nothing is found in Scala's Gelosa Isabella, which may have been based on the same novel by Bandello that probably provided Shakespeare with the Hero-Claudio story. There is a scene in Scala's La mancata fede parallel to Orlando's wooing of the disguised Rosalind in As You Like It.

The anonymous Gl'ingannati has long been considered a possible source for the Viola-Orsino story in Twelfth Night. As pointed out earlier, Secchi's Gl'inganni and L'interesse offer as good parallels or possible sources.¹⁵ The fundamental likeness between Shakespeare's play and Italian comedy is the heroine's disguise as a boy. In eighteen of Scala's fifty scenarios the prima donna disguises herself as a boy, and three of his scenarios, La gelosa Isabella, Li finti servi, and Part I of the pastoral Dell' Orseida, offer parallels to Shakespeare's plot. These three scenarios, to be sure, may have been based on the Ingannati or on Secchi's comedies.

Several analogues to Falstaff's wooing in the Merry Wives of Windsor have been found, the closest of them being Li tre becchi (“The Three Cuckolds”),¹⁶ a scenario not in Scala's collection. The tragicomedy Cymbeline, which is based in part on a tale by Boccaccio, has parallels in Scala's Alvida and in another scenario entitled La innocenta rivenuta (“Innocence Restored”).¹⁷ The Winter's Tale is another tragicomedy based on a novel and there are parallels in Scala's La fortuna di foresta Prencipessa di Moscou and in Li duo finti zingani. Lea has suggested half a dozen parallels to the Tempest among the scenari and argues that the tight structure of Shakespeare's last play may have owed much to the influence of Italian comedy.

The results of seeking Italian analogues in the plays of other Elizabethan dramatists, such as Jonson, Chapman, Marston, Dekker, and Middleton, are similar to what is found in examining Shakespeare. The Italianate flavor is there and readily perceived even when the setting and names have been changed, but whether it comes directly or indirectly from the learned comedy or from the commedia dell' arte is seldom clear.

The Italian scholar Rébora calls the Elizabethans “magnificent plagiarists,” and it is true that almost all the authors of this remarkable epoch robbed high and low, gathering motives, ideas, and images without indicating their sources. The debt of Elizabethan tragedy to Italy is well known and the writers of comedy owed no less to the Italian dramatists, novelists, and actors. The Elizabethans were fascinated by the complicated Italian plots, by the theatricality of their mistaken identities and disguises, by the clever repartee of their characters, by the cynical heartlessness of even the best Italian writers like Machiavelli, Aretino, and Giordano Bruno. Above all was the fascination of the “unbridled Italian vivacity, the lack of restraint and of religious or moral checks, the innate ready wit and comicality, which naturally struck the slower and more stable English as something different, expressive, picturesque, as something in itself dramatic.”¹⁸

Some of the early Elizabethan dramatists were apt to find fault with Italian comedy because of its loose morals and with the Italian comedians because of their vulgarity and bawdry. In 1578, George Whetstone complained that “the Italian is so lascivious in his comedies that honest hearers are grieved at his actions.”¹⁹ In 1592, Thomas Nashe condemned the Italian comedians: “Our players are not as the players beyond sea, a sort of squirting bawdy comedians that have whores and common courtesans to play women's parts and forbear no immodest speech or unchaste action that may procure laughter; but our scene is more stately furnished … our representations honorable and full of gallant resolution, not consisting like theirs of Pantaloon, a whore, and a zanie, but of emperors, kings, and princes.”²⁰

The disparaging remarks of Whetstone and Nashe are misleading if they suggest general disapproval and an unwillingness to follow the Italians. Both writers were devoted followers of the Italians though in different ways.

Whetstone's Promos and Cassandra was based on Giraldi Cinthio's novella of Epitia and possibly on Cinthio's tragicomedy of the same name. Moreover, most of the good features of this early English tragicomedy were derived from Italian drama—namely, the intricate plot with its mistaken identities, dramatic discoveries, reversals of fortune, and, it may be, its comic scenes.

Nashe, whose forte was satire and realism, fancied himself as an English Aretino. “Of all styles,” he said, “I most affect and strive to imitate Aretine's.”²¹ That he was a successful imitator is apparent in the following passage from Pierce Penilesse,²² which sounds very like a speech of Flamminio in the Cortigiana:

We want an Aretine here among us, that might strip these golden asses out of their gay trappings and, after he had ridden them to death with railing, leave them on the dunghill for carrion. But I will write to his ghost by my carrier, and I hope he'll repair his whip and use it against our English Peacocks, that painting themselves with church spoils, like mighty men's sepulchers, have nothing but atheism, schism, hypocrisy, and vainglory like rotten bones lie lurking within them. O how my soul abhors these buckram giants, that having an outward face of honor set upon them by flatterers and parasites, have their inward thoughts stuffed with straw and feathers, if they were narrowly sifted.

Elizabethan dramatists may have disparaged the Italians, but they made good use of them. By 1590 or thereabouts the English writer had so thoroughly absorbed the methods and some of the humors of the Italian that he was hardly conscious of imitating either learned or popular comedy. Moreover, the better Elizabethan dramatists, gifted artists like Shakespeare and Jonson, did not try to copy the letter, but imitated something more important, the spirit.

As for the average Elizabethan theatergoer at the “public” Globe or at the “private” Blackfriars, he did not care where the play came from or whether its antecedents were English or Italian or ancient Roman. He only wished to lose himself in another world for two or three hours. Nor does the average theatergoer of today ask for more. For those, however, who like to know where the play came from and who were the ancestors of Horatio and Isabella and Dromio, there is a special satisfaction in viewing the plot and the characters through the long perspective that reaches back to Florence and Venice, even to Rome and Athens.

Notes

1. The Italian comedians apparently did not use scenario to designate the written outline of a plot, but the term did come into use and is now familiar in both Italian and English.

2. A very considerable amount of written matter has been assembled in the three volumes of Pandolfi's Commedia dell' arte: storia e testo.

3. Teatro delle favole rappresentative, overo la ricreatione comica, boscareccia, e tragica: divisa in cinquanta giornate, Venice, 1611. Pandolfi (2.166-244) reprints several of these.

4. A General History of the State … Translated from the Eminent Lewis Riccoboni (London, 1754), p. 65.

5. See Pandolfi.

6. See Pandolfi, 1.359-381; Enzo Petraccone, La commedia dell' arte: storia, tecnica, scenari (Naples, 1927), pp. 202-247. Lea (pp. 44-46) has translated a few passages into English.

7. See T. Beltrame, “G. B. Della Porta e la commedia dell' arte,” in Giornale storico della letteratura italiana 101 (1933), 277-289.

8. See Petraccone, La commedia dell' arte, pp. 383-389.

9. Angelica, comedia de Fabritio de Fornaris Napolitano ditto il Capitano Coccodrillo, comico Confidente, Paris, 1585.

10. L'atteggiamento o il travestimento popolare della commedia erudita (1.515).

11. In an unpublished dissertation, The Elizabethan Drama and the Commedia dell' Arte (Urbana, Ill., 1956), Henry Frank Salerno has gathered a large number of Italian analogues, including some never pointed out before.

12. Kenneth Muir, in his Shakespeare's Sources (London, 1957), lists no scenari of the commedia dell' arte, and only four learned Italian comedies as questionable “subsidiary” sources of Twelfth Night.

13. P. 438.

14. See Lea, pp. 631-642.

15. See above, p. 126.

16. Lea (pp. 580-584) gives both the Italian and English of this scenario.

17. Lea (pp. 568-579) gives both the Italian and English of “Innocence Restored.”

18. Rébora, L'Italia nel dramma inglese, p. 134.

19. Dedication of Promos and Cassandra.

20. Pierce Penilesse, in Works of Thomas Nashe (Oxford, 1958) 1.215.

21. Works 3.152.

22. Ibid. 1.242.